The young workers' state was the vanguard against capitalism, with all its flaws. As such, it was worth protecting, and therefore appropriate measures were justified, especially considering Lenin was preparing to remove the measures dictated necessary by war.

>foolish regulations on things that do not significantly affect climate change is a huge drain on the economy
>Benghazi was a scandal; they knew the truth but decided not to tell it so Obama could win his second term
>I do not currently own an AR-15 but I plan on buying one in the future. People are trying to ban transfers of AR-15s. Therefore they're trying to take away my AR-15.
>taxes are around 50% including state and local taxes which means the public is funding a wasteful government instead of investing in things that could better benefit the economy
>the deficit is not dropping; government spending is still out of control
>if one person's hard-earned money pays for something for someone else, that is communism

All other things aside, your last bullet point describes all taxes (it also describes gifts, which I'm sure you didn't intend). Taxes most certainly are not communism and do not have anything do with communism. Just ask any of the Communists on this board.

Governments are made by the people for the benefit of all society. Things like security, food quality regulation, trade oversight, and roads are all public goods that every gets to use. It's a community working together as a whole for the greater good. Government is by its nature communistic.

Shit nigger. Communism is a stateless society. I think the word you're looking for is 'socialistic' but even that is wrong. Socialism is a different mode of production to capitalism.

I would agree that a government's role should be to protect its people from external threats, internal threats, AND from hunger and cold, etc, but that's not socialist. Socialism, as I said, is a mode of production. Current governments, however, don't fulfill that role. Governments of liberal democracies are nothing more than an extension of bourgeoisie power.

If communism is supposed to be stateless then it is just a naive fantasy version of anarchy that ignores man's selfish disposition.
Governments form when a community gets together and pools their resources to protect the welfare of the community as a whole. It is not forced equality like socialism. That is what a true government is; how is that not communistic?

Governments today have grown beyond the power they were given by the community and have become corrupt because they are made up of selfish people who act for selfish reasons.

'To each according to his contribution' is clear. 'To each according to his needs' is often misunderstood, but simply: no one's ability is equal, why are their needs and wants?

Anarchists don't understand that state power has to be seized before communism can be achieved. That's the difference between us and them.

Finally: socialism and communism are not about redistribution of wealth. Redistribution is a temporary fix for the capitalist system. We believe that communism and socialism will remove the need for redistribution.

The difference between Anarchists and Communists is not actually about who-takes-the-state-and-does-what. tr00 communists will abolish the state in favour of workers communes in a localized fashion.

The difference is their framework of analysis; anarchists will generally argue from an ethical standpoint where Marxists analysis consists of dialectics. Marxists and Anarchists have a lot more in common than tr00 marxists and Leninists. The only REAL reason people think there is this huge rift between Anarchism and Marxism is because of a feud between Bakunin (who is a drip) and Marx. Bakunin was advocated that people will receive goods in accordance to the difficulty of their labour, and Marx argued that this perpetuates the wage system and therefore is counter revolutionary (for lack of a better work, I'm fucking sleepy).

It's also worth mentioning that the whole 'dictatorship of the proletariat' was mentioned by Marx very few times in his work. And it isn't even in roman connotation of the word, anyways. So when communists talk about seizing the state, I laugh, because all that does is perpetuate a revolution that is more similar to the age of enlightenment than anything else (middle class employs the lower class to kill off the upper class, and the middle class becomes the new upper class, and the lower classes stay low).

The fact is that the state is necessary to be seized, and the dictatorship of the proletariat to replace that of the bourgeoisie. In what form the dictatorship of the proletariat takes is irrelevant, really, in what we're discussing. The point is you can't simply have achieved the world revolution, and immediately abolish the state and enter communism.

And one thing I find extra hilarious is how the greatest spontaneous self-organization of workers was crushed by the soviet union. They pop up everywhere every now and then, which is the right way to go. Occupy factories, towns, points of trade and commerce. Bring the economy down.

Arm yourselves when tanks show up. You think a Vanguard can do any of that? A vanguard is tyranny. In revolution, create the type of society you want to live in while you are fighting. Military discipline will only breed boring, robotic wage slaves.

"While betraying this lack of thoughtfulness, Comrade Trotsky falls into error himself. He seems to say that in a workers’ state it is not the business of the trade unions to stand up for the material and spiritual interests of the working class. That is a mistake."

Like I said in the other post, I feel you're criticising Stalin more so than Lenin.

As for vanguardism, I've been looking more into Rosa Luxemburg's writings, so I'd prefer not to comment just yet.

Bolshevism doesn't work. It reproduces the capitalist mode of production and gets caught in a vicious circle.

Sure, the state must be 'seized' but it is also radically transformed. It is not the same state that existed before hand. You reorganize it into a democratized, decentralized collective.

And, like I said, the dictatorship is a minor part of Marx's work and there is only attention to it because of the Soviets, which does NOT give it any merit whatsoever. Everything that happened to the soviet union is exactly why their methodology & socialism in one country and completely and utterly useless.

Indeed, Lenin spoke of the alien nature of the state apparatus the Bolsheviks merely took over:

"Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which, as I pointed out in one of the preceding sections of my diary, we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?

There is no doubt that that measure should have been delayed somewhat until we could say that we vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been "busy" most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine."

As he said, the government was busy with military engagements, and the economic repercussions of said engagements. Saying that, there were indications that Lenin was preparing to ease up on the authoritarian measures dictated necessary by counterrevolutionaries.

Further is the claim that Bolshevism doesn't work. I feel that's a little bit of a cop-out. Lenin, believing that socialism in one country doesn't work, introduced the NEP (partly because war communism wasn't intended to last forever, and Russia wasn't industrialised and therefore hadn't achieved mature capitalism, etc) due to the failure of socialist revolution in Germany and other states. And since socialism in one country was something Stalin originally thought of as rubbish, it's difficult to say that socialism in one country really was Bolshevism.

The thing is both the bureaucracy and the capitalists of the 'west' used spectacular means to perpetuate their ideologies. Both were just different manifests of capitalism which needed to be destroyed. Lenin's ideology was a warped adaptation of Marxism which betrayed several key concepts.

Nonsense, arisaka. Indeed, there were measures taken that weren't desirable, but they were necessary, considering war and foreign intervention. But it was far as oligarchy, and was definitely a young workers' state, albeit with a bureaucratic twist, which Lenin highlighted to avoid anything stupid being done (like disbanding trade unions as Trotsky wanted).

That's a red herring. There were many other ways things could have worked out.

And it was obvious Russia wasn't ready for socialism but that prick went through with it anyways, with his warped idealism. There's a little something called 'economic determinism'. He violated basic Marxist theory.

You know why he needed a vanguard party? Because the proletariat hadn't been developed enough. (also he thought they were stupid. fuck him).
You know why the proletariat wasn't developed? Because most of the population were still peasants.
You know why most of the population were part of the peasant class? Because there weren't many factories.
You know why there weren't many factories? Because capitalism hadn't centralized people into urban environments in mass numbers yet.

Lenin was basically one of those kids who makes up all these stupid house rules when you play Sorry (best canadian game).

Coca-Cola isn't necessary for society to function either but people still want it therefore it exists.
Wise investing funds the growth of new firms that offer goods or services that people want. By helping these firms grow, people's wants are satisfied (more or less) and more jobs are created. These people do contribute to the economy; there are just not very many of them so they get paid quite a bit. Much like professional athletes, they don't directly contribute to the economy but by doing what they do, the help HDTV firms, boneless chicken wing producers, chicken farmers, chip producers, clothing producers, etc all grow when they have millions of people willing to spend money.

"Communism" generally refers to a system in which all property, or all means of production, is owned collectively by society rather than privately by individuals. Or it's the ideology that supports such a system. That's what Maddow meant, and that's typically what opponents of certain liberal policies are referring to.